A Personal Narrative Zine

Main menu

Category Archives: 07 – The Murky Realm

“The Murky Realm” is a biographical sketch of a tragic union with some creative engineering…

My parents never should have gotten married. But even though my father was gay and my mother was chemically imbalanced, this was the 60s, when single men in their forties did not identify as queer and people with personality disorders were rarely diagnosed, much less treated. And marriage was inexorable. The tragedy, of course, is that, besides ruining their own lives, five children came out of this unhappy coupling. But that’s not the point of this story. That comes later. “The Murky Realm” is about how these two people got together, fell apart, came back together, then fell apart again only to get back together again…

I pieced the facts together from what we were told growing up, what I remember from talking to my parents as an adult before dementia set in. I used my imagination for the rest, after walking many miles in both their shoes.

The text is typewritten on my Olympia Manual. The size is 5.5 x 7 and the cover is black cardstock with a handwritten title piece glued on. The page count is 44.